I passed up an opportunity to head up to Ottawa to see them last night, since I thought that I had tickets for tonight. Then a call from my friend this morning saying that he forgot to order them… now everything is sold out. 🙁

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Cheer for the crest on the front of the jersey, not the name on the back.

I’m a tad bored, so I went and looked it up. Montreal is one of only 8 teams in the league to make it past the first round 3 or more times in the last 6 years. Of those other 7, only Detroit and San Jose have done it more than three times:

Montreal (04,08,10), Pittsburgh (08,09,10), Philadelphia (04,08,10), in the East

Detroit (04,07,08,09,10), San Jose (04,06,07,08,10), Vancouver (07,09,10), Anaheim (06,07,09) and Colorado (04,06,08) in the West

I agree this trend of giving one-year contracts is not impressing me. I also agree that giving Price more than 2.25 million would be giving too much. We have shown faith in him(management) and he should reward us with a 4-year 8-9 million dollar deal.

Keep in mind, if he gets more than that, I won’t hate PRICE for it and slag him incessantly. I will not be very appreciative of management if they are not wise with their money.

Jaro signed for 3.75 million…. and we keep hearing that he would’ve been a LOT more than Price. But for me, the way Gauhtier has played this Price is going to get some ridiculous and undeserved amount of money. Anything over 2.25 million is too much for Price and un-earned. But I’m guesssing he gets 3 million for 3-4 years. Which is too much, but Gauthier’s given his agent all the cards.

And I HOPE it’s not a 1-year contract (like Gauthier’s done for other players) which is like the teacher telling you which day the test will be on, and by the way, what questions are on it. This 1-year stuff is like giving players a do-over until they have ONE really good year they can hang an inflated contract on. It’s stupid.

PS: The Glen Sather orders a Pizza thing is good for a chuckle… at least we’re not THAT bad. Well… let’s not go there.

for me PLAYOFF TEAM means to go further than first round… it means they can really compete with playoff teams – not just being easy shot for others. How many times in last 6 seasons HABS did go to at least 2nd round?

Curiousity got the best of me so I looked it up. Larouche was traded in the ’81-’82 season to the Whalers for picks, one of which was Petr Svoboda, a name you should be familiar with. Svoboda was a reliable defenseman for us for years, including a Cup win in ’86. He then went to Buffalo for Kevin Haller, who was a reliable defender on our Cup-winning team in ’93. I’d say we won the Larouche trade- our team did far better than Hartford in the years immediately after/all the time, and our return was far better than theirs was.

Side note- Larouche was the first player to score 50 goals in a season with two different teams. We dealt him away and easily won the trade.

They’ve made the playoffs 5 of the last 6 seasons, that’s fairly regular I’d say. Only a handful of other teams could say the same thing.

Remember Pierre Larouche? Dude was a pure sniper, a 50 goal scorer who played in Montreal in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He won a couple of Cups with the Habs. We dealt him away to Hartford in like ’82 for prospects/picks (sound familiar?). Montreal won their divison multiple times and was a perennial playoff team for the rest of the decade (including a Cup in ’86 and a Cup final in ’89), and Hartford was always a mediocre playoff bubble team.

Essentially its an hour long interview with lebron james, and I read that the proceeds from advertising are going to the boys and girls club of america. As full of himself as he is, Lebron definitely does his part for the community.

Also, I dont think lebron approached ESPN and asked them to do a one hour special, it seems more like something ESPN would ask of lebron because its a slow time for sports right now.

That’s why the Habs first round pick this year should stay at Harvard and get his degree. See Dave Fischer our pick from 2006. Maybe things would have been different if he would have played Junior but drafting is allways a crap shoot so sometimes you never know what you get 3-4 years later. In regards to Fischer I checked his Stats and they decreased each year he played for the Gophers.

They let him go because Martin had just brought the Habs to there best play-off success in 17 years in his first year under contract so you do not then fire him, so options were to offer asst coach position which he turned down, refuse to let him out of his contract which would be both unfair to Boucher and send a bad message to anyone the habs try to hire for future coaching positions or let him walk. There is a lot of talk about how uncaring the Habs management is, letting Boucher persue an NHL head coaching spot was the right thing to do for Boucher.

Have people’s lives become that empty that an hour long television show on where some douchebag athelete chooses to play and get paid $5 trillion dollars for it somehow fills the void? I mean, when the people who actually watch this utter tripe are on their deathbeds however many years from now, won’t they have the sense of regret to admit to themselves that just maybe they would like to get that hour back and use it for something a little more worthwhile?

Not really. Carey price is a competitor. He also understands dollars and cents. Hes year older, a year more mature, and I think a good half-season of riding the bench taught him a few lessons. I’m sure he comes in fired up this year and performs admirably. If the players in front of him can give him some goal support, hes going to win a lot of games also.

ya well we barely made the playoffs last year and made one heck of a playoff run with the help of a hot goalie.

bigger, stronger, more potential, past success… big deal and who cares because the nhl is all about what have you done for me lately.

if the habs continue to have scoring problems (2.64goals/game) price will have to be 2.64 or better for the team to be a 500 team… and if he has a 2.77gaa with a high save percentage we will miss the playoffs. our defense is getting up there is age as well and won’t be blocking shots liek they did in the playoffs…

Several sources familiar with the situation but not authorized to talk
publicly said Kovalchuk hasn’t compromised on an average annual value of
$10 million, close to the NHL-leading $9.538-million average
Washington’s Alexander Ovechkin earns in a 13-year deal.

The Kings say they can’t accommodate Kovalchuk, retain their core and
bring in the support players necessary to become a consistent Stanley
Cup contender.

Good on LA Kings for not getting seduced by the obvious but short term advantage of signing a big star UFA. They are a young club building for the future. Signing Kovalchuk now at the expense of one of their drafted stars in a year or two makes no sense at all.

That’s not a knock on Kovalchuk. He’s smart to shop around for the best deal. He wants long term and he wants the big bucks that a perenial 40 goal scorer can command. He prefers the NHL over KHL, and he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his career playing in an empty rink like Atlanta. He would be stupid to do anything less than what he is doing right now.

I agree that these problems occur much younger and by the time the kid is 16 years old…..it is pretty obvious in most cases who is college/university material and who is not. Minor sports and life in general with most families having two working parents and the chaos of everyday life make schooling and early learning a challenge but it is doable. The elite level athlete even at early ages have to learn to balance (in reality it is their parents who need to do this as kids are kids). I wish there were more programs available where athletes at a youunger age could get their ice time in during the day at school and learn they have to go hand in hand. That would be ideal but funding limitations make it impossible and programs like that are only accessible if you have the big dollars to send a kid to a Hockey Factory like St Mary’s (Crosby, Parise, Toews,etc). I know there is a similar program for baseball in Quebec somewhere that has produced several major leaguers over recent years.

Athletics should be tied more to schooling during the day so that when the day is done kids can be kids and as you said not driving 2 hours each way to play 10 minutes of game time. Outdoor rink seasons are getting shorter every year and the most criminal thing fo all is that most rinks go unused during the day yet for “prime time” there is almost always an ice shortage everywhere you go……millions spent on these arenas by taxpayers and they sit vacant all day …… schoool should tap into this hardcore but they don’t. I know I would have been far motivated to excel academically if it was linked tighter to sports.

Ed, I lived in Montreal for the first 30 years of my life, and probably speak better French than you, and still have lots of family there and go back often (I’m just down the road before Ottawa).

All you are doing is stating that the average Habs fan gets upset for nothing, and you’re right. the fact is most of these same fans were upset at all the changes last year as well, and voiced their displeasure. Many of them were really upset to see Kovalev go, but I tend to think the Habs management knew better.

I have no problem with any fan questioning the Habs’ moves, but that’s different from constantly bashing the Habs’ management because they are doing things differently than the average fan would. I personally see no logic in b!tching before we even see this team play a few games.

Read my signature….says it all.

Go Habs Go!!

“Fans are great, but the quickest way to start losing is to listen to them.” – Sam Pollock

If these kids were training and playing during the day at school, they would not spend all of their evenings weekends and vacation time being driven from one arena to another, would learn to read, would have time to study and do homework, and could, in the majority of cases, go to a college and continue to play competitive hockey. Minor hockey is, presently, a wasteland, and one reason why most of our kids prefer to chill elsewhere.

They finished in the FINAL FOUR! I know only The Cup matters, but be happy we were better than 26 other teams. You did not think that would happen last summer and you don’t think it’ll happen now, but can we please just wait and see?

I think we’ll finish with 5-10 more points than last season, and by then we should know how likely we are to win a couple rounds again.

By the way, i loved our players last year too, but the point is they are not Habs anymore. I wish them the best, but when they play against the Habs, i’ll be cheering for OUR guys.

Go Habs Go!! “Fans are great, but the quickest way to start losing is to listen to them.” – Sam Pollock

Not necessarily true…I know several players who played junior hockey here with the Frontenacs and had a year of university paid for for each season they played in the OHL. Many who play here even take classes while they play in their later years…obviously full time is not possible given the heavier schedule demands of the CHL but many take classes and then when they are done many go on to have their university paid for and proceed to play university hockey as well. Soem hockey palyers are just not cut out for university and that is true of any segment of the population…from my experiences with the guys I have known the guys who are university material….end up going to university ….the ones who are not….do not….the hockey players that are good enough…continue to play hockey.

Time to get fully subsidized hockey and paid coaches into the schools. Local programs no longer work because they are too expensive, too time consuming and often run by incompetent people (junior hockey included).

We need to get our best athletes playing our sport at an early age just as we need to give them another reason to show up, learn discipline and navigate through the classroom nonsense they will inevitably be subjected to on a daily basis.

I don’t think that it’s insane for “people who say that they are fans” to support the players that worked hard and played with a lot of heart.

I’m not saying that the team is worse (or better) than last year but it seems normal to me that people would support Halak, Moore and Metro. The same as they supported the players that got cut last year.

I also wonder how a coach can get players to play with that much heart when they see what happens.

In the article from Hickey’s column….Paul Kelly says, “The problem with the CHL is that it talks only about its success stories. They don’t talk about the youngsters who don’t make it.” Such a true statement, that is. In Junior, if you don’t make it a lot of players hit the wall. After their junior careers are over, and they went undrafted, or they were drafted but didn’t make the cut, many of these players have nothing left to show for all those nights of riding the buses and drinking beer. For quite a few of them, the only thing that changes is they don’t ride the bus anymore. At least with the College option, should they find their hockey careers are over, a player finishes his career with a degree and a future. I’m not calling this the template for all CHL players, but it does apply to many of them.

First of all, any way to administer a shock to anyone who mentions the blues new goalie?

I have to laugh when I read G-Man saying the goalie and role players who got the Habs to 4th best are gone.

The role players are being replaced with other role players. There was no way to know if the ones we had would do as well this year anyway. It’s not like they all have sparkling careers, hence the term role player. As for the goalie, the Habs are banking on Price because he is younger, bigger, stronger, and cheaper.

It is just insane how people who say they are fans can be negative before the players even hit the ice. I’m not saying to have blind faith, but at least wait. you are all the same people who said all last summer and into the season that the Habs would miss the playoffs or get bounced in the first round….4 straight!

Wait until they actually suck to say they suck!

Or you can BELIEVE.

Go Habs Go!! “Fans are great, but the quickest way to start losing is to listen to them.” – Sam Pollock

Ian – I golfed the past three days in this heat so today I’m taking it easy and sitting by my pool. Shawn is taking his boys fishing and then dropping by my place for a beer and a dip in the cement pond.